Habitat Chronicles

The Technologist and the Guru (or Chip and Randy market themselves)

So now we're in sales mode. This is the place where we set aside any pretense of humility for a moment and toot our horns. If that sort thing bugs you, just skip these pieces and rest assured that we'll be back with more rantings on technology and community soon, now that we have a bit more time on our hands for blogging.

We are looking to change the world, and this requires money and leverage. People who have money and leverage don't just hand it over to you because they think you're a swell guy or because they're simply overcome with enchantment by the ineffable wonderfulness of your vague utopian vision. They are looking for what actual value they'd get out of the deal in return.

Chip is the Senior Technologist and Randy is the Communities Guru. We have worked together off and on for more than 20 years, as our skills compliment each other well, but sometimes we work apart for years at a time. So, if you are only interested in the technologist or the guru, that's fine with us; not everybody needs the synergy.

Chip Morningstar: Professional Background

The first thing: I am an innovator

At Xanadu I helped create the world's first distributed hypertext system.

At Lucasfilm I invented the MMOG and the avatar. (The contemporary usage of the word "avatar", meaning the graphical representation of one's online persona, is my coinage.)

At AMiX I managed the creation of the world's first online P2P marketplace.

At Electric Communities I architected the infrastructure for the first (and so far only) fully distributed and yet securely extensible virtual world platform.

At Communities.com I built the world's largest online graphical chat system.

At State Software I was a coinventor of AJAX and codiscoverer of the JSON data-interchange format.

At Yahoo! I lead the creation of platforms for reputation management and identity presentation to serve scores of disparate properties and 500+ million users.

Some of the things I have had a hand in creating have become industries unto themselves. And some of the others that haven't, will.

The second thing: I am a consummate technologist

Scalable servers for MMOs and virtual worlds.
Client-server architectures.
Secure, extensible distributed object systems.
High performance, asynchronously coupled distributed systems.
Object-capability programming languages.
Parsers, compilers, translators.
System security, cryptographic protocols, identity management.
Graphical virtual environments.
Electronic commerce. Markets and incentive engineering.
Highly reliable, mission critical systems.
Software reengineering and development process restructuring.

These are my palette.

The most important thing: none of this happens solo

While I will proudly boast of my leading roles in the above accomplishments, they were all the products of teams (some small, some quite large) of very smart and capable people working very, very hard. To deliver successfully on a vision requires not merely a big idea but the ability to bring together a group of talented people around the big idea and to lead them through the often ugly, day-to-day reality of actually making something work. This includes dealing with strong egos, emotional insecurity, ignorance, confusion, technical and financial uncertainty, and the myriad other foibles that accompany any human undertaking. This is what I do.

For more detail, please see my resumé.

F. Randall "Randy" Farmer: Professional Background

I'm a husband, a father, a gamer, and a globally recognized pioneer of multi-player gaming, virtual worlds, and social media. For more than 30 years, I've been inventing and delivering powerful new methods to connect people with each other using computers and networks as the mediating technologies.

Professionally, I serve many roles simultaneously – Product Innovator, Community Consultant, External Evangelist, and Scout.

• Product Innovator

  • My most innovative product-related work spans a broad spectrum of platforms and applications. This multidisciplinary work has created hundreds of millions of dollars in value and spawned entire product categories. Here are some of the firsts I actively developed or led:

    • Platforms: Message boards, fully-distributed virtual objects, very-large-scale reputation systems, AJAX application frameworks and services, and the YOS - Yahoo! Open Strategy – under development.

    • Applications: Graphical MMOGs, avatars, virtual currencies, information markets, and I was lead social architect on Yahoo! 360° (for which I invented the social network feed and other often copied features), and Nexus – next generation Yahoo! Groups – under development.

  • I currently am listed as an inventor on five granted patents and have about ten that are pending:

    • Issued: Virtual objects, multiplayer gaming, avatars, and social media.

    • Pending: Social media, reputation systems, and mobile networking.

• Community Consultant

  • Social media is still new to many organizations, and most first intuitions about how users will react to changes are strategically wrong. Classical product research doesn't accurately represent how people interact in these environments, leading to costly, and sometimes irrecoverable, product design errors. Product managers and user experience teams often need specialized help when creating new community/social media experiences. They need a community consultant to help them with their initial design iterations, community growth planning, and abuse mitigation design.

  • I've played this role for my entire career - for large companies, governments, NGOs and startups. For Linden Labs, I consulted to create a more consumer-centric interface for Second Life, and they've implemented nearly all of my recommendations. For the Skoll and the George Lucas Educational Foundations I advised on strategy for selecting the right kinds of tools for their customers. For Yahoo! I traveled around the world to educate product and engineering teams on how to construct community infrastructure for success – which means for scale and for content quality.

  • My community consulting sessions have been embraced enthusiastically by my clients, garnering praise such as “equivalent to a graduate level seminar” and “the best two hours of our project so far.”

• Evangelist and Scout

  • Along with sharing social media best practices and innovation within an organization, there is a need to communicate insights and inventions to outside parties – sometimes to trade associations, affiliated entities, or to the public at large.

  • I have published numerous papers and articles and co-author a blog on online communities and games. My comprehensive experience with the entire social media field provides ample opportunity to speak to the public as well as to the press as a no-nonsense voice on these technologies and their best practices.

  • My widely recognized reputation in the field also provides me special access to emerging technologies and invitation-only conferences and meetings that have been critical to my employer's positioning as a thought-leader. For example, for Yahoo! I was instrumental in both the Flickr acquisition and the OpenID initiative.

I'm looking for a strong leadership role in a company or institution that is committed to improving the lives of people via social media. Senior Product Management/Strategy and Fellow or DE track positions are probably most interesting, but I'm considering other options as well, including short term consulting arrangements.

For a detailed employment history, extensive endorsements, and list of professional accomplishments, please see my LinkedIn résumé.

Chip and Randy cut loose!

Perhaps you heard that Yahoo! was laying some people off today?

It turns out that this force reduction included [me] Randy Farmer and Chip Morningstar - much to our mutual surprise as we each had strong contributor/leadership roles in the company. From here it looks like they might have gone after those with larger salaries given the number of top-quality people we saw get the axe today. Given what we were working on, it was doubly confusing.

This layoff should be a recruiters dream.

Don't use farmer@yahoo-inc.com or chipm@yahoo-inc.com anymore - those don't work and aren't forwarding, as of now. I'm randy.farmer at pobox dot com, and Chip is chip at fudco dot com.

[update]My phone is back online so feel free to call or email or Y!IM frandallfarmer.

Apparently CNet thinks I was on the Yahoo A-List, at least as far as a MS/Y merger goes. Lets see if Microsoft thinks so too! [/update]

Randy and Chip

[update] Chip's resume link above is better now.[/update 2/13]

Randy Farmer joins the RIT DIT IAB

I'm honored and delighted announce that I have joined the RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology) DIT (Department of Information Technology) IAB (Industrial Advisory Board). They have an excellent game design and development program which I'm looking forward to visiting when I'm out there for the first board meeting in April.

I'd like to thank Elizabeth Lawley for submitting my name for consideration. I hope to meet and exceed their expectations.

For my readers - have any of you been on one of these boards before? I could use a little orientation and/or advice. I think that shaping young minds is one of the most important things we can do in this life, so I'm just a little nervous about being effective in the academic environment. Please either leave a comment or send me a message at randy dot farmer at pobox dot com.

As of 2/4/8 the IAB link still needs updating...